That was in 1964, her break-out role, and the one for which she would always be remembered.

In the several years after that, she did land parts on the TV shows “Peyton Place” and “Dr. Kildare” as well as in a few forgettable movies (“Jennifer on My Mind,” “The Jesus Trip”). But by 1972 it was all over for her and Hollywood.

What happened to “Tippy” Walker? For starters, don’t call her “Tippy.” That’s a child nickname taken from her middle name of Tipton.

“I discourage it; I don’t like that name,” she told me near the beginning of our talk on a recent afternoon.

Walker had been hesitant to do the interview because she was trying to clean up her cluttered apartment in order to satisfy her landlord. She said there are roaches in her apartment building, so the landlord wants to have every apartment sprayed. But she has told the landlord she is allergic to those chemicals and worried about what it might do to her cats.

Those cats are omnipresent. When I asked her how many she has, she replied, “More than five.” As we went into her bedroom, a mother cat was curled up in a corner with one of her kittens.

Walker proudly showed us her paintings, which are very colorful and whimsical. She also creates many Christmas decorations; they are still up.

“I invented a deck of cards,” she announced, pulling out a series of small pastoral scenes. “I call them positive imagery/solution cards.”

I discovered Walker after local movie critic (for Citizens Television) Bob Paglia died in February. Walker and Paglia were close friends; they went to see movies together and understood each other’s quirks and interests.

While writing about Paglia’s death and efforts by his family and friends such as Walker to arrange his funeral and a memorial service (still a work in progress), I have had many phone conversations with her. She didn’t tell me about her background; another one of Paglia’s friends tipped me off.

He wrote that the two young actresses in “Henry Orient,” Walker and Merrie Spaeth, displayed an “almost uncanny naturalism.” He added that during a revelatory scene near the movie’s end, Walker showed she “had reserves of emotional understanding that could put her among the greats of film acting.”

Colapinto said it was hard for him to find out what happened to “that radiant actress who played Val.” But then he discovered a series of lengthy posts on IMDb message boards in which Walker wrote about moving to New Haven to pursue her artistic interests. In those posts she also wrote candidly about her brief career and her romantic relationship with that film’s director, George Roy Hill.

“We fell in love during the filming of ‘The World of Henry Orient’ and remained so through most of my senior year in high school,” she wrote, according to the IMDb post.

She was 16; he was 41 — and married, with four children.

“There really wasn’t much in the way of a physical relationship as I wasn’t so into that, being so immature,” she wrote.

Calapinto said their relationship “seemed to have been mostly platonic.” But when I asked Walker if that’s a fair and accurate description of it, she replied, “No. It was romantic. It began platonic but it grew into something else.”

Hill, who would go on to direct “The Sting” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” had picked Walker for the role of Val from hundreds of other young girls who auditioned. She said he invited her to have lunch with him every day during the filming of “Henry Orient.”

“We became fascinated with each other,” she told me. “He was charming, charismatic, protective, a very clever man. But also a little bit out of his mind.”

“He was the director,” she noted, so she was intimidated by his authority and power as well as his “charm.”

“I was the one who broke it off,” she said, still with a tone of wonder. I said to him, ‘We shouldn’t do these things. I’m 16!’ And then he got offended! He didn’t want to work with me anymore” in follow-up movies.

“It was a funny time,” she concluded, not sounding bitter nor angry with a man who took unfair advantage of her. “And my whole life is like that.”

Walker said she fell out of contact with Hill. He died in 2002.

“Looking back on my acting career,” she told me, “I really am not happy about it. I wasn’t even that happy at the time. I didn’t like the roles.”

“I wasn’t a great actress,” she added. “I was OK. I couldn’t please myself. And I never got comfortable with the dialogue.”

She said the lines she had to speak in “Henry Orient” were inappropriate because they were for teenage girls and “written by old men.”

She doesn’t like to see that movie because “I don’t like to watch myself and it makes me remember how seized up I got. He (Hill) would call out, ‘Action!’ And I would think, ‘Oh, great. Now I’m relaxed!’”

Even when the movie was released and her work was praised, she wasn’t happy nor proud. “I didn’t think I did a good job. It felt so phony. I thought, ‘Maybe there will be another role.’ But there never really was another role that I liked.”

She said she was paid $5,000 for her work on “Henry Orient.”

When I asked her why she walked away from stardom, she said, “It walked away from me at the same time. I changed agents and he wasn’t really interested in being an agent anymore.”

She added, “I never fit in; I’m not a babe.”

As for managing her career, she said, “I didn’t have a team to get me to calm down and focus.”

Walker had a difficult relationship with her parents, who had sent her off to the prestigious Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

“My parents were great but they were hard,” she recalled. “I was not someone they could deal with very well. They had expectations; I was supposed to be the perfect lady. But I loved art. And I loved hippies!”

Walker said she came to New Haven in 1984 because her brother had gone to Yale and she was familiar with the city. But she admitted she also has been homeless at times. In addition, “I lived in a 12-foot trailer for six months in Hamden.”

When I asked how she pays her bills now, she said she relies on her brother, who lives in Texas, and Social Security.

She never married. “Oh, but I went out with some incredible men! I used to be really, really pretty. I’ve had this incredible life.”

But now she avoids romantic relationships; she made this decision even with Paglia. “I’m not interested in romance. I’m 68. It’s all right; I need to paint, I need to write.”

She said she is writing a screenplay with the kind of “mystical” characters she always wanted to portray.

Walker describes herself as a sensitive, spiritual person. She said she saw Jesus in a vision when she was 3. And she is certain Paglia’s spirit is nearby.

“He’s probably right here,” she said, nodding around her living room. “I think he hangs out with me a lot.”